Game Changer? Just Maybe. Why Gates' Move Into Anti-Poverty Work Is a Big Deal
The Gates Foundation is getting into anti-poverty work in the United States in a big way with a four-year, $158 million initiative. The move is a significant departure from the foundation’s past domestic endeavors, which focused almost exclusively on education.
Though the initiative represents a pivot, Gates’ commitment to education played a major role in pushing the foundation in this direction, CEO Sue Desmond-Hellmann told Inside Philanthropy.
“We got into this space because of all the years we worked in education,” Desmond-Hellmann said. “Education leaders told us that to give students the best chance at success, we would have to engage with the problems that face students outside the classroom.”
Jane Waldfogel, a Columbia University professor who wrote Too Many Children Left Behind, is among those experts who've long been arguing for a broader approach to improving student outcomes. Her research supports a link between what happens outside school and kids’ success in the classroom.
“The U.S. has very large achievement gaps between children from low- and high-income families—large relative to what they were historically and also large relative to the gaps in other countries,” Waldfogel said. “We also know that a substantial portion of these achievement gaps is due to factors outside of school.”
Gaps that exist before kids start school tend to widen once they arrive, she said. “Although, of course, schools have a critical role to play in reducing achievement gaps, there is also a critical role for policies to help level the playing field outside of school.”
For years, poverty has been one of the most polarizing issues in education. Reformers pushing for more choice and accountability have insisted that poor kids could make big gains if they just had better schools and teachers, and said that defenders of the status quo too often used poverty to excuse failing education systems. Progressives, in turn, charged that the school reform movement had unrealistic expectations for low-income students and was failing to reckon with deep structural inequities in U.S. society.
Traditionally, the Gates Foundation has been a leader of reform funders focused strictly on schools. But as Bill Gates himself has acknowledged, after years of often disappointing results from its K-12 work, the foundation is finally broadening its approach to look at factors outside the classroom.
The new initiative has some education experts on the left enjoying a moment of vindication. “I have said repeatedly that the foundation should focus on the root cause of low test scores, which is poverty,” said NYU professor Diane Ravitch, an education historian and one of Gates' harshest critics. “So I am very pleased that the foundation is taking an important step in this direction.”
This move, moreover, comes after a recent pivot by the Gates Foundation on its K-12 work to back locally Game Changer? Just Maybe. Why Gates' Move Into Anti-Poverty Work Is a Big Deal — Inside Philanthropy:
Gates Foundation Pledges $158 Million to Fight Poverty in U.S. – Next City - https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/gates-foundation-pledges-158-million-to-fight-poverty-in-u.s via @NextCityOrg
